Thursday, January 19, 2017

The volunteer program of Mount Rainier National Park began this blog almost ten years ago, in the wake of the great flood that swept through the park in November of 2006. Since then, we've posted more than 1400 stories about the awesome work that volunteers do to help protect our park and serve its visitors!

At the time we opened this account, the National Park Service had very little presence on social media, so we were pioneering mostly uncharted territory. We selected Blogger as our blog platform for a variety of reasons including ease of use and our best guess that it would last as a website.

Over the years, the NPS caught up with us, and today, there is an official Park Service presence on many different social media platforms, including Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, Periscope, Tumblr, Twitter, and YouTube. Mount Rainier has official sites on most of these, under the name "MountRainierNPS." The sites follow guidelines established to ensure uniformity and best practice, including the use of an NPS arrowhead as the icon or avatar for each site, and the suffix "NPS" at the end of each name.

Unfortunately, Blogger is not included in the list of approved social media sites.

Therefore, over the next week or two, the volunteer program will be migrating to Tumblr instead. Tumblr allows 250 posts per day, so the transfer from Blogger will take at least six days to complete. When it is done, we'll post a note here, permanently directing you to the new site. Meanwhile, you can check out the work in progress at our new address, http://RainierVolunteersNPS.tumblr.com.

Notice that our familiar "RainierVolunteers" name is now "RainierVolunteersNPS," in line with NPS standards. Otherwise, you can expect the same information-rich content as before, full of stories about volunteer opportunities and accomplishments and photos of volunteers in action!